Joel Rose

Joel Rose is a National Desk Correspondent based at NPR's New York bureau.

Rose's reporting often focuses on immigration, criminal justice, technology and culture. He's interviewed grieving parents after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, resettled refugees in Buffalo, and a long list of musicians including Solomon Burke, Tom Waits and Arcade Fire.

Rose collaborated with NPR's Planet Money podcast for a story on smart guns. He was part of NPR's award-winning coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the US. He's also contributed to breakings news coverage of the mass shooting at Mother Bethel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath, and major protests after the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Eric Garner in New York.

Before coming to NPR, Rose worked a number of jobs in public radio. He spent a decade in Philadelphia, including six years as a reporter at member station WHYY. He was also a producer at KQED in San Francisco and American Routes in New Orleans.

Rose has a bachelor's degree in history and music from Brown University, where he got his start in broadcasting as an overnight DJ at the college radio station.

Mustafa Willis has seen the bail process in New Jersey up close. Willis was arrested in Newark in 2010 for unlawful possession of a firearm. The charges were later dropped. But he spent three months in jail before his family could scrape together $3,000 to bail him out.

"When you feel like you don't have that kind of money, the only you gonna do is say I'll take probation, so I can get home and get back to my job and get back to my family," he says. "That's the only thing. Because how the rules work, if you don't bail out, you gonna sit there."

When New York City launched the nation's largest municipal ID program, advocates said it would give immigrants in the country illegallyaccess to bank accounts and city services.

"They could go visit a loved one in the hospital, they could go visit their child's teacher," Mayor Bill De Blasio said at a press conference earlier this month. "If they had an interaction with a police officer, there was an ID recognized by the NYPD. It was a very basic concept."

More than a dozen super tall residential towers are under construction. Many of the global ultra-rich who buy these apartments spend just a fraction of the year in them. Critics say they're paying a much lower tax rate than full-time New York residents. But defenders say these luxury buildings support good jobs and contribute to the local economy.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani remains one of the leading contenders for secretary of state in the Trump administration. Foreign policy is not an official part of the mayor's job. But there were a few times when Mayor Giuliani clashed with visiting diplomats and foreign heads of state.

Before Rudy Giuliani was America's Mayor, he was the mayor of New York. Part of the job is to make sure parking tickets get paid, and some of the biggest parking scofflaws in town were the visiting diplomats at the United Nations — some of whom owed tens of thousands of dollars.

She's a school board member in suburban South Brunswick, N.J. Baig was running for reelection this fall. She had just put out yard signs with her name on them when a friend from her mosque called.

"Someone wrote 'ISIS sympathizer' on the sign," Baig says.

That caught Baig by surprise. She's the only Muslim on the school board. But there's a sizable Muslim population in South Brunswick and the surrounding towns. And this didn't just happen once or twice.

For years, New Jersey drivers enjoyed relatively cheap gas — thanks to one of the lowest state gasoline taxes in the country. The state's gas tax hasn't gone up since 1988. But that all changed Tuesday, when it jumped by 23 cents a gallon.

Across the state on Monday, drivers raced to fill up their tanks before a tax hike took effect.

For most of his career, Wall Street has been good to Rep. Scott Garrett (R, N.J.). Garrett is chairman of a powerful subcommittee that regulates banks, a job that traditionally comes with perks, including big political contributions from financial firms. But that was before Garrett made some controversial remarks about gays.

The Clinton Foundation and the Trump Foundation have similar-sounding names. And they've both become political targets in this election cycle. Beyond that, charities experts say, they have remarkably little in common. But the differences between them might reveal something about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a "Notice of Violation" to the Donald J. Trump Foundation and ordered the foundation to cease and desist from soliciting contributions in New York.

The notice states that the Trump Foundation failed to register with the Charities Bureau before soliciting contributions or engaging in fundraising activities.

First, a confession: I've never liked gefilte fish. The slimy, grey balls of fish from a jar have always struck me as icky.

Turns out, I am not alone.

"I had the same experience as you. I never ate gefilte fish," says Liz Alpern. "It was disgusting to me. I literally think I never ate it, until I started making it."

That's a remarkable statement coming from someone in the gefilte fish business. Alpern is half of the team behind the Gefilteria, which makes artisanal gefilte fish. Yes, that is a thing. Alpern gave me a demonstration at a catering kitchen in Brooklyn.

After Sept. 11, 2001, there was a spike in hate crimes against Muslim Americans. Now, on the 15th anniversary of the terror attacks, Muslim leaders say Islamophobia is cresting once again. A string of recent murders in New York City has left the city's Muslim residents on edge.

In the last month, three Bangladeshi immigrants wearing traditional Muslim dress were killed on the streets of Queens. One of them was the imam at Al-Furqan Jame Masjid, a modest storefront mosque in a working-class neighborhood called Ozone Park.

At the White Rose Diner in Linden, N.J., owner Rich Belfer tosses a dozen round, thick slices of processed pork to sizzle on the grill. To Belfer, it's beyond dispute that those are slices of Taylor Ham.

But the flavor is more difficult to explain. "I don't know if anybody can really describe it," he says. "It has a little smoky flavor. It has a little spice. It has a little original Jersey flavor in it."

Seventeen states have legal protections to prevent discrimination against transgender people in areas like housing and employment.

One of those states is New Jersey, and when employers there want to know how state law applies to transgender people, many of them call Robyn Gigl. She's a partner at a top law firm; a board member of Garden State Equality, a nonprofit that works on LGBT issues, and is also a transgender woman.

"I put a human face on something, and I consider myself the most normal person in the room," she says.

When you ride on buses or trains in many parts of the United States, what you say could be recorded. Get on a New Jersey Transit light rail train in Hoboken or Jersey City, for example, and you might notice an inconspicuous sign that says "video and audio systems in use."

A lot of riders are not happy about it.

"Yeah I don't like that," says Michael Dolan of Bayonne, N.J. "I don't want conversations being picked up because it's too Orwellian for me. It reeks of Big Brother."

The city of San Francisco and the state of New York took groundbreaking steps toward new and more generous leave policies. Advocates hope the moves will create momentum in other places that are considering similar measures.

The mayor says his town, known for its huge casinos on the boardwalk, will run out of money in a few weeks. State lawmakers have a plan to get the city's finances under control. Atlantic City leaders don't like the state's takeover plan. But residents are hoping for anything that will change their luck.

"A lot of people are walking away from their homes," says Al Bailey, a local real estate agent who was born and raised in Atlantic City.

Sunny Balzano's modest watering-hole in Brooklyn was a throwback to another time. It was known simply as Sunny's, after the beloved bartender and raconteur who transformed a faded longshoremen's bar into a local institution. He died Thursday at the age of 81, just weeks after the publication of Sunny's Nights, a new book about his life and times.

Sunny was not a master of artisanal cocktails, as he was quick to admit. "I still don't know how to mix drinks, do I?," he joked during an interview at the bar last month. No one disagreed.

Streetcars are rumbling back to life in cities across the country from Portland to Salt Lake City and Atlanta, with New York becoming the latest city to hop on the bandwagon. But as these new streetcars run into unexpected roadblocks, critics say this mode of transportation might not be the answer to great public transit.

New York City has an ambitious, multibillion-dollar plan to connect Brooklyn and Queens with a streetcar. It would bring convenience to residents from Red Hook, an isolated area cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by water and a major highway.

The debate over whether Apple should defeat the security on the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook isn't the first time the company has clashed with law enforcement.

The FBI also wanted to get into the iPhone of a drug dealer in Brooklyn. Jun Feng pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine last year. As part of its investigation, the government obtained a search warrant for Feng's iPhone. But the phone was locked by a passcode, so prosecutors asked a judge for an order compelling Apple to bypass it.

Korean food is built on bold flavors: spicy pickled vegetables, sweet, smoky meats and pungent, salty stews. That can be a little intimidating for some American diners. But the authors of a new book called Koreatown hope to change that.